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Higher Order Negativities
The term "Negative Negativities" was, according to Pema Chödrön, used by her spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in an article "Working with Negativities" (a chapter of the book The Myth of Freedom). In her interview "Good Medicine for This World", Pema Chödrön told us how reading the article had an important impact on her life.
For example, you returned to your parked car, and found your favorite new car scratched. You got upset, and that is negativity.
If you only got upset, that is first order negativity. But when you start blaming the parking management, or people for not being responsible, or yourself for not being more careful, and so on, then you have higher order negativities.
The Buddha once asked, if you are hit by an arrow, which hurts more, the arrow or your mind?
For most people, the escalation of negativities in their minds is what really hurts.
What Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is saying is that it is alright to have first order negativity, but not alright with negative negativities.
Dukkha is in the nature of all things. Shunryu Suzuki said that it is OK to suffer is.
Instead of developing negative negativities, the original negativity should be look upon as poison used in medicine, it will then be a source of creative energy.
How can we turn negativities to healing? Pema Chödrön's answer is compassion. Start with compassion to oneself, stop blaming oneself, accept oneself unconditionally. Then realize that others are suffering in the same way.
Extend compassion to them, and to all.
Rumi wrote a poem called "Night Travelers," It's about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole.
Finally practice Tonglen, the art of absorbing other's pain and sending out help and compassion.
A lifelong practice.
Knowing and understanding that negative negativities is bad, is not enough. It must be practiced over and over again with mindfulness. No matter how long we have practiced, we will fail again and again. It is as if we have to be kept honest and humble. Each failure should be seen as a wake-up call. When we meditate on an object such as our breath, we will time and again be distracted by sound, thoughts, feelings, and so on, but is alright as long as we return to the object of meditation as soon as realize the distraction.
Abandon all hopes of fruition.
This may seem strange to most, but if we are really committed to "here and now", we can't allow the future to distract us.
This is consistent with other Eastern wisdom, found in the Bhagavad Gita ( "Since I have no cravings for the fruit of actions, actions do not contaminate Me.") and in the Wu Wei of Taoism.
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I don't understand why having hopes of fruition is bad.
It is actually one of the slogans of Tonglen.
In Pema's own words, "One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you're wanting yourself to get better, you won't. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.
One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not good enough. We think back to the past a lot, which maybe was better than now, or perhaps worse. We also think ahead quite a bit to the future-which we may fear-always holding out hope that it might be a little bit better than now. Even if now is going really well -we have good health and we've met the person of our dreams, or we just had a child or got the job we wanted-nevertheless there's a deep tendency always to think about how it's going to be later.
We don't quite give ourselves full credit for who we are in the present."
We must accept completely and unconditionally and appreciate what we have here and now.
It is explained in more detail in the Tonglen link in the post
negative negativity is not positive, so -(-(A)) is not + A. It is more like - A^X
The idea of "here and now" is contrary to beliefs in paradise, which is "there and then". Despite this there are many Christians who embrace "here and now". How do we explain this?
The notion of "here and now" in the sense of "the best moment is now, the best place is here" is logically incompatible with "there and then" beliefs in Heaven.
However in practice, people often give only lip service to "here and now" used as a popular slogan, or dilute it to become "partial here and now" and "temporary here and now".
This happens for example, when "here and now" means only being present, concentrated and only during meditation.
Good example of negative negativity is how Bush reacted to 9/11 by killing innocent people in Afganisthan and Iraq, and generally spreading suffering every where.
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